digloria at mindspring.com wrote:
>
> wdk wrote:
> > No way, not in this context, when we're talking about that giggly
> > pudeur promoted by mass market magazines.
>
> well let's see here, i thought for sure you were comparing it to art.
If you or I grabbed a Brownie box camera and took photos of naked people for a while, then, as the body is a natural subject for art, there's a fair chance we'd do something halfway artistic - if we had it in mind, anyway; not if we'd set ourselves to snapping the perfect passport photo or mug shot. But when a photographer is very concerned about placing each and every snap at precisely the right wavelength along a spectrum of nice-to-naughty, art never pops up.
That's not a statement of theory, try as I might I can't come up with a theory of art; it just works that way. Take Playboy: they spend nearly as much on their "pictorials" as the Catholic Church spent beautifying the Sistine Chapel, but despite their effort and resources, you're lucky if there's even one artistically memorable picture in a year of Playboys. Sure, the tightly delimited subject matter is deadening, but it still doesn't explain such total artistic failure. There are other narrow genres, science fiction and detective stories for example, where, despite the despotism of editors and consumers, art sneaks through. Well, if Analog, while trying to publish space opera, accidentaly engendered some artworks, how can so many figure photographers working so diligently fail so consistently to do so? It's a dismal mystery.
I was comparing that SI issue to art, and that's the weird thing - I see at least a half dozen photos and maybe more that succeed as art photos. If one of those photos worked, that could just be a coincidence, but a half-dozen? wow! This never happens with with magazine girlie-photos. So I got me two copies, at $5.95 a pop.
As good as it turned out this year it's still locked in a rigid genre, and if those suckers are going to run their stuff through such a tight band-pass filter regarding the exposure of nippies and fuzzies, I'll continue to ridicule them with kiddie words.
> even so, why use the giggly, embarassed words of childhood. be grown
> up about it. aside from that, on another list, we determined that the
> stupid childish words are for when you're talking about it with other
> guys. 'cock' is for when you're talking about doing something with it
> that you perceive as important & powerful.
What list is that? Maybe I can subscribe and finally find myself the proper word. "Cock"'s no good, I have a deficiently bulgy self-image. Cocks crow aloud, loud, you know. What one does with one's cock is whirl it around over one's head like a cowboy gunfighter slinging a lasso; that's an OK dirty joke, but I really haven't got one of those. "Penis" is no good either, a book abstraction, visual inspection indicates I have one, but it's numb. "Dick," that lousy word I'm stuck using for lack of a better, is also the exact word I generally use to indentify shitheels and no-good bastards. The U.S. President when I was a teenager was a Dick, imagine what a pun like that does to a guy.
Plus any of those words is just one part in three of the whole works, where's the one word that describes it all? At least, you can talk about a woman's "pussy," which is inclusive. That's hardly an ideal word, kinda uncouth maybe, but it's got a nice cross-image in it, did you ever pet a cat and hear it purr?
This really bites, lacking that word. Rumor has it a Frenchman has a dozen and the Italians have three hundred words to use, and I don't have a God damned one. Back in my youth, I've got in bed with a woman, and want to ask her politely if she'll do this or that to my, my, I end up calling it "it," this is sad, disgraceful and ridiculous.
> i read you two as disingenuously framing it as if it was a childish
> embarassment, when in fact you were objectifying women's bodies,
> pornographically, and not eroticizing them
Is that a typo? I'd think objectifying a woman's body pornographically would be eroticizing it - super-eroticizing it, I mean, any human body has an inherent internal sexual charge to it, but porno multiplies that charge by ten million and moves it out to the surface for the eyes of the viewer. Yeah, and then, practically all guys, me included, get sucked right into that image, like stupid fucking robots. However, if that was all that was happening, no kidding, I wouldn't have consciously bothered to bring that banal response to anybody's attention. You ever been a robot? It's educational but not so pleasant.
> --all the while deriding your own bodies somehow just not fit for such
> 'giggly pudeur' yoshie??? analysis please, you're way better at it
> than i.
But I don't think men, or rather, idealized male images, are, or should be, more unfit than women's images. I'd only guess that they wouldn't generate enough revenue to justify a special annual men's swimsuit issue in SI. There actually is a market among women customers for sexy male pix, across a spectrum from the "Sexiest Men in the World" issue of People magazine to downright porno - I'd guess, all in all, maybe a hundredth as large as the market in photographic objectifications of women's bodies. Now that "hundredth" is a really interesting number, for crying out loud, why?
> > If we're talking about serious books that aren't pulling that news
> > stand strip tease, like for example Hans Fahrmeyer's "Between Men
> > and Women," we'd get to use real grown-up English (Latin?) words
> > like "pudendum" or "penis," which would be easier on our sense of
> > dignity for sure,
>
> oh why penis?!! i find that just as childish. it's clinical, an
> attempt to cleanse it of its sexuality.
>
> > but if we're talking Sports Illustrated, it fits better to use
> > cutesy wordies like "nippies" and "whosises" ("whoses"?)
>
> and why don't men have nippies by the way?
They have their exact spectral frequency in media male images, it's down toward the infrared, but there are venues where male nippies in images are strictly verboten.
> > 1.) Is TOO easy being a buoy, I just float, I never exerted myself a
> > bit, all I got to do is, act naturally. 2.) Is NOT ugly, I'm hurt -
> > snif - you feel that way. It has a nice symmetrical functional look
> > to it, particularly when it's awake. 3.) Hardly "altogether too
> > often," instead, alas, not nearly often enough. This world is not
> > paradise.
>
> oh you know WDK that i was pushing your foot, but i still think this
> was there a bit. there was this sense that men's bodies shouldn't be
> or aren't displayed. it seemed a variation on the attitude of my
> students which, yes, is hilarious but not altogether surprising.
> yoshie's right on in that regard. but i must say that it was also
> interesting listening to the women gak out about unshaved legs and
> underarms. oh they always find this so horrifying, so dirty, so yuck
> when, in fact, it's such a new thing to shave body hair.
Yeah, that's odd to hear women openly deriding some other woman because she doesn't shave her legs or underarms. First, what in all the world is so "gross" about a little translucent fuzz, second, why the Hell would they care, and last, why would they tell me, a guy, about it?
> and, as a fellow floridian, don't you find it fascinating this
> glorification of the hairless male body? all these adverts for hair
> removal. i suspect that it's a phenom that began in gay male
> subculture and has gone mainstream with the increasing demand placed
> on men to have that 6 pack or washboard torso and buff, but not too
> buff, everything else.
In fact, I'll guess it has to do with doing drag, where those dark male leg hairs are obviously a dead giveaway. God, I'm so dense I didn't realize until now that those ads in the Weekly Planet were aimed at guys! You know, there are real advantages to being an old fuck. I'm this many decades nearer the graveyard, but I don't care anyway, and now I can painlessly ignore completely when they try to sell me on doing crap like getting tattooed or pierced or shaving my legs. Shaving your legs! What an awful hassle. I honestly have never understood how so many women, including my older daughter, put up with it.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net